


To Cleanse the Wound, to Drain the Rot

by StuntMuppet



Category: BioShock Infinite
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Gen, Post-Game(s), Revenge, What-If, pre-burial at sea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-11
Updated: 2015-11-11
Packaged: 2018-05-01 03:48:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5191025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StuntMuppet/pseuds/StuntMuppet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Bioshock Infinite but before Burial at Sea, Elizabeth thinks about what she's really looking for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Cleanse the Wound, to Drain the Rot

The first time is difficult. You remember me, and are waiting.

"Don’t blame you," you say, not rising even when I point the gun. "Just make it fast. I’ve been here long enough."

In my anger I had planned to make you suffer as in another life you'd made me suffer. I was ready to be cruel - not to be merciful. So I abide by your wishes this time. The bullet nestles between your eyes and I open another tear to leave before your body's had time to fall.

The second time is easier. You are old, and occupy a throne atop the ruins I have made.

"What would you have been if he had kept you?" You ask me. "The child of a pathetic drunkard who’d sooner feed his vices than you. Is that what you’d prefer to being the Lamb of God? Unmaking the world of Man to build it again in your image?"

I cast you from your chair, dash your brain out against smoldering wood and fractured stone. Years and war have made you frail here, and you die without any resistance. Your death spares nobody, changes nothing. You have what you wanted.

The third time you are not my father yet. Another month or so, judging from your wife's condition. The sickness that will claim her is already settling in her skin, weighing her down to the bench where she sits; she looks blankly your way, watching you and two other men palm guns and mutter threats, but she is too weary and numb to intervene.

I never knew her name. I never asked it.

I think about sparing you. I've seen what becomes of your choices, but I can't see yet what will change if you aren't there to make them. Would I be motherless still? What would become of me in an orphanage? Perhaps the Luteces - and you - would just find me there instead. But with no one to drag me back I would travel to your world whole, and would you even want me then?

And what if my mother lived? You're a constant, so am I, but what about her?

How great a variation will these worlds bear?

I hadn't even considered her when I set out through the first tear. Maybe if I had I could have gotten her help in one world or another, tended to her disease before it grew as severe as it is now.

But I brought only tools to kill, not to heal.

The songbird ribbon is still round my neck. I press it to my mother's palm, and tell her to seek out Rosalind Lutece. I don't tell her that Lutece will do nothing for the sickness. But perhaps my mother will give Rosalind's name to you, and you'll remember it when they come for me. Perhaps you'll surrender me then.

She will show me what kind of man you are, this time.

I wonder if she loved you.


End file.
